Of Interest

The significance of this baseline varies in importance with our reversible President.

The WPA was approved on March 6, 1933 as a part of the first one hundred days. The importance of this engine of recovery from the depression is well-known. So are the many civic landmarks, recreational areas, and artistic productions created for ‘we the people’ that continue in use to this day.

How different from an insistence on a wall and cutting funding for the arts.

I know art and architecture are not hot buttons on this blog, but if anyone’s interested in more detail, below are two good books:

The USPS issued these WPA Poster stamps with ten designs on a sheet of twenty. The date of issue was March 7, 2017 at Hyde Park, New York, the site of FDR’s home, and library and museum.

4 Responses to “The First One Hundred Days …”

I enjoyed my years as a propagandist, although those with whom I worked called it “corporate advertising”, “branding”, “image”, or “corporate identity”. And I don’t know whether the ‘Oxford comma’ is even necessary in this listing of business euphemisms.

Perhaps the most invidious tactics were possible under the Third Reich. Goebbels, in the last days, even controlled the horoscopes.

Many countries’ propagandists (Britain, Russia, France, etc), had considerable control, and examples seem to reflect the same simplified art styles, at least in the posters.

The Imperial War Museum London has great collections of posters in time of war, particularly for the ‘home front’.

In times of crisis, either real or manufactured, people need simplified messages of reassurance. And governments regardless of type need to be sure it is forthcoming.

More conventionally, propaganda is a term limited to communications from totalitarian governments which presents information that is biased or contrary to the known facts. I think those efforts are far more extreme than anything Dick Swart ’56 accomplished on behalf of corporate America. For the latest in Communist propaganda, check out the best efforts of North Korea.